New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever the personal computer.

The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.

When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

My Review:

When I picked up Red Team Blues two years ago, it looked like a standalone. I absolutely LOVED it, but I just didn’t see how it could ever be more than a one-off. Forensic accounting just isn’t all that exciting – but the story did an excellent job of playing into that assumption. To the point where forensic accounting in general might not be all that thrilling, but the situations that Martin Hench gets himself into while doing his job certainly are.

That Marty is a terrific raconteur telling his own story made the whole thing work – and work WAY better than I expected. But I still expected it to be a one-off. Two books later, it’s pretty clear that I was wrong – and I’m glad about it.

The Martin Hench series reads like it’s been written backwards. That first book, Red Team Blues, took place in the present. The second book, The Bezzle, turned the clock back to 2006, when Marty was very much in his prime. (Meaning that this books takes place before either of the others and a new reader could start here and be just FINE.)

This latest book, Picks and Shovels, goes all the way back to the beginning. This is Marty’s ‘origin story’, the story of how Marty became the man that readers know and love from Red Team Blues.

So it begins with Marty flunking out of MIT because he’s discovered the one, true love of his life. Just as so many people did in the mid to late 1970s, Marty was introduced to personal computers at the dawn of that revolution – and it swept him away.

It also swept him out of MIT, into an Associates Degree program at UMass Boston where he was introduced to the Apple ][ Plus and the revolutionary program VisiCalc. As it turns out, spreadsheets made Marty’s world go round, and his rare combination of skills, the ability to create complex business models AND the accounting background to engineer or especially reverse-engineer a company’s financial statements, turned what most saw as a ‘hobby’ into a satisfying, sustaining and surprisingly fascinating career.

The story in Picks and Shovels also sets up the pattern of Marty’s life – at least as he tells it. Because, this origin story, like the stories of the life that follows after it, is the story of how Marty dives head-first into a job, discovers that his employers are not on the side of the angels, and then puts himself on the side of the angels by the most expedient method possible.

Unfortunately for Marty, but fortunately for the reader, Marty’s expedient methods of switching sides usually piss off the villains in a way that is exponentially worse than if he’d been professional about the whole mess. He ends up making lifelong grudges while thinking that he’s the good guy. Which he mostly is even though his self-righteous cluelessness creates even more enemies than he needed to. On the other hand, it creates good friends, too.

That, along with telling the story of how Marty got to be the Martin Hench of Red Team Blues, Picks and Shovels is also steeped in the early ‘glory days’ of the Silicon Valley ‘gold rush’ and the whole thing is told in Marty’s wry, witty and often self-deprecating story, combines two great stories into one terrific tale.

Escape Rating A: I fully admit that there’s a certain amount of nostalgia in just how much I enjoyed this book. I built my first computer out of a kit. In 1979. Meaning that I remember this period entirely too well. I even lived some of it. Scarier still, I’m realizing not just that Marty and I are about the same age, but that he’s exactly the sort of guy I dated back then. And I’m a bit freaked out about all of that. I’m also VERY weirded out that a time period that I have adult memories of has become historical fiction.

Because this is stuff I remember as it happened, I found Marty’s story about the early days of personal computing and the rise of Silicon Valley to be a bit like the fable about the frog in the pot of water that is slowly turned up to boil. Not that the situation is quite as bad as that poor frog’s, but rather in the way that Picks and Shovels is very much grounded in real events in the way that what started out at least seemingly sane got overwhelming surprisingly fast but the people in the soup were too busy to notice. Those years were every bit as chaotic as Marty describes.

Where the water really starts boiling, to stretch the metaphor, is the way that the story adds in the fictional elements in ways that are utterly plausible. Because, while this particular crap didn’t happen, crap like it very much did. To the point where I had to look to see if the setup was based semi-obvious on a real company, although if it is I couldn’t find it.

But there were plenty of situations of the kind of built-in customer lock-in and the jacking of prices because companies and organizations were held hostage, not just during the 1980s but even into the 1990s in some niche applications. It was all as wild and wooly as portrayed.

The situation does eventually fly right over-the-top, but until that point most of it parallels stuff that really happened, if not necessarily all in one single combination.

The story, and the series as a whole, works because of Marty’s voice as a character. Marty is the one telling this story. So, of course, Marty is the hero of his story, as we all are the heroes of OUR own stories – even the villains. But Marty is a likable, intelligent and a thoughtful character. His head is an interesting place to be – at least as he tells it. And this story makes it easy to see how the Marty we met in Red Team Blues got to be that person even though he’s not fully baked in Picks and Shovels.

That’s what origin stories are for, after all. This particular origin story turned out to be a doozy.

OTOH, it’s hard to imagine the series diving back any further into Marty’s past. Meaning that the one-off could be a three-off and be done. Howsomever, based on what we’ve learned about Marty over these three books, I’m confident that Marty has PLENTY more stories to tell about his escapades in the years between Picks and Shovels and Red Team Blues. And I’d be happy to read them all!